Retail businesses are typically required by state law to post prices for merchandise (‘goods’ or ‘items’) offered for sale. One approach is to price each item individually with price tags. The price tags are often paper-based, and affixed to the merchandise using adhesive labels. This requires that each item be individually marked. For many businesses, the marking of each individual item is labor intensive and the associated cost may be significant with respect to the selling price of the merchandise. This approach can be cost prohibitive, or at the least undesirable for many businesses. For example, in hardware stores and grocery stores, individual marking of items is disadvantageous.
An alternative approach, typically used by grocery stores, is to place the goods on a shelf with a price tag mounted on the shelf in the proximity with the items. The price tag is typically located on shelf near the merchandise displaying the retail price. The items themselves may have a retail price printed on the merchandise by the manufacturer, or at least have a bar code that is read by a scanner upon checkout, which retrieves the pricing information from an inventory database. This approach requires that a single price tag be provided on the shelf and avoids having to individually mark each item. For some businesses, such as grocery stores, this is the normal method of indicating prices to the consumer.
However, this approach is manually intensive to accommodate changes in prices. Store personnel must affix the prices to shelves. Further, many stores discount items periodically by advertising sales and this requires new, temporary price tags to be displayed on the shelves. Further, once the items are ‘off sale’ and return to the regular price, the sale price tags must be removed. In many states, consumer laws or store policies dictate that if the items are advertised at a sale price, they must be sold at the labeled price, even if the sale has ended. Thus, the retailer must ensure that the prices are updated in a timely manner or experience adverse economic impacts.
Further, retailers typically provide more than just the price of the goods to consumers. Typically, an internal SKU (stock keeping unit) number and description is included on the price tag so that store personnel know what item should be stocked at that location. Depending on the retail environment, the price tag may also indicate the name of the brand, distributor, and other information. For example, in a grocery store application, the price tag may also indicate the unit price (e.g., price per pound) of the item. Of course, should a manufacturer change their packaging weight, a new and updated label must be provided.
It is evident that retailers must expend significant resources to keep price tags current as well as accurately reflecting temporary sale prices. Should prices increase, or any data on the price tag change, the old tags must be removed and the new tags provided. Thus, a method of providing a more economical and more flexible approach for displaying price and other consume information is needed.